To Win in Toulouse

Now the only thing a gambler needs

Is a suitcase and a trunk.

-- Animals, The House of the Rising Sun

So, as many others, I have been to the LibreOffice Hackfest in Toulouse which -- unlike many of our other Hackfests -- was part of a bigger event: Capitole du Libre. As we had our own area and were not 30+ hackers, this also had the advantage that we got quicker to work. And while I had still some boring administrative work to do, this is a Hackfest were I actually got to do some coding. I looked for some bookmark related bugs in Writer, but the first bugs I looked at were just too well suited to be Easy Hacks: fdo#51741 ("Deleting bookmark is not seen as modification of document") and fdo#56116 ("Names of bookmarks should allow all characters which are valid in HTML anchor names (missing: ':' and '.')"). Both were made Easy Hacks and both are fixed on master now. I then fixed fdo#85542 ("DOCX import of overlapping bookmarks"), which proved slightly more work then expected and provided a unittest for it to never come back. I later learned that the second part was entirely nonoptional, as Markus promised he would not have let me leave Toulouse without writing a unittest for commited code. I have to admit that that is a supportable position.

Scenes like the above were actually rather rare as we were mostly working over our notebooks. One thing I came up with at the Hackfest, but didnt finish there was some clang plugins for finding cascading conditional ops and and conditional ops that have assignments as a sideeffect in their midst. While I found nothing as mindboggling as the tweet that gave inspiration to these plugins in sw (Writer), I found some impressive expressions that certainly wouldnt be a joy to step through in gdb (or even better: set a breakpoint in) when debugging and fixed those. We probably could make a few EasyHacks out of what these (or similar) plugins find outside of sw/ (I only looked there for now) -- those are reasonably easy to refactor, but you dont want to do that in the middle of a debugging session. While at it, I also looked at clangs "value assigned, but never read" hints. Most were harmless, but also trivial to get rid of. On the other hand, some of those pointed to real logic errors that are otherwise hard to see. Like this one, which has been hiding -- if git is to be believed -- in plain sight ever since OpenOffice.org was originally open sourced in 2000. All in all, this experience is encouraging. Now that there are our coverity defect density is a just a rounding error above zero getting more fancy clang plugins might be promising.

Just one week after the Hackfest in Toulouse, there was another event LibreOffice took part in: The Bug Squashing Party in Munich -- its encouraging to see Jonathan Riddell being a commiter to LibreOffice too now, but that is not all, we have more events coming up: The Document Foundation and LibreOffice will have an assembly at 31c3 in Hamburg, you are most welcome to drop by there! And next then, there will be FOSDEM 2015 in Bruessels, where LibreOffice will be present as usual.

Originally published on 2014-12-02 22:31:40 on wordpress.